As someone who has undergone extensive genetic testing, we're still in the dark ages of medicine. We basically know nothing at all about jack.

There was a similar case of a woman who absorbed her twin brother in the womb. Only a small patch of cheek had her brothers DNA, but that is exactly where DNA is taken from when they want to take a DNA sample. This was discovered when she took a DNA test which came up as male.

I think there was a similar case, but about the mother. The courts took her baby and she was on trial for kidnapping.

Eventually a geneticists saw it on the news and suggested she got tested again using DNA samples from other parts of her body and they found out she also was a chimera.

Some racism was involved as she was working class and black, so the courts were just looking for a reason to take her baby and throw her ass in jail..

Apparently this is more common with cats. If you see a cat with two different coat patterns, either divided down the middle or along the neck (as if they only had spare parts left at the cat factory), they may also be a chimera.

Why does this make DNA scary? I think it's awesome that our understanding of DNA makes us able to unravel things like this.

Can't even trust a brother you ate in utero

That means every time that guy has masturbated in his life he was really jerking off his dead brother.

I’m shocked to learn that this isn’t a joke about Greek mythology I didn’t get.

The brothers ghost, after cucking him for revenge:

There was a woman who went to prison for this, her chimera baby's dna contradicted her story, I think to get public assistance of some kind, and the dna test convinced the state assholes she was lying and they sent her to prison, I think some researchers exonerated her eventually.

The last time I did a deep dive on the research, they estimated somewhere around 3% of the population had some form of chimerism, and I calculated my personal chances around 6%. And then I did some family research and anecdotal evidence pushed that number much higher, including being a single born twin.

One of the articles I recall postulated the number is much higher than 3% due to the condition only being confirmed or discovered through rare circumstances that result in multiple genetic testing.

Another fun-ish, kinda fucked up, weird story... There's a woman, Henrietta Lacks, who had a biopsy for her cervical cancer in January of 1951 before passing in October of that year. These cells were found to be incredibly resilient and quick to replicate. Most cells only lasted a few days before dying, but hers seemed to be functionally immortal under controlled lab conditions.

So, unbeknownst to her as consent wasnt required for such things at the time, her cancer cells were cultured and grown into large samples to be used in research. Those samples were split off and passed off to other labs. They've since spread around the entire world for a ton of research and commercial purposes.

They were used in the development of the polio vaccine, for example, as well as having been used in research on cancer (obviously), AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic materials, gene mapping, etc. They are used to test safety of cosmetics as well. Approximately 11,000 patents involve these specific cancer cells.

In the 1970s, there was an incident where these cells contaminated other cell cultures, so the researchers needed DNA samples from the Henrietta's family to differentiate her cells from the others. This is the first time anyone in her family learned that her cells had been used in research at all, let alone that her cells were being cloned and used in research and commercial product development across the entire world. It became a legal issue after this, and after a couple decades of litigation, it made it to the Supreme Court of California where they ruled that "discarded biological materials" is no longer ones property and could be commercialized freely. They continue to occasionally fight against aspects of her cells' usage, and there are health privacy concerns for her family as well, but results have been mixed for them.

Henrietta the person died in 1951 at age 31, but her immortal cancer cells which still contain her full DNA sequence continue to live to this day, 75 years later. One source claims that as much as 50 million metric tons of tissue has been generated from these cells.

To add that the general understanding of how DNA works and is used can be scary, just like other measurements. I bet there's still a lot of people that believe fingerprint analysis is some kind of rock solid science based evidence, but my understanding is that it's very much prone to errors and interpretation.

I don't mean to say that DNA analysis suffers the same flaws, just trying to illustrate with an example.

I'm a data analyst at a medical nonprofit, primarily doing analyses on germline variants for rare forms of cancer. I'm new to this kind of work, but had a decent educational background in biology.

Something I've learned is that genetics are complicated as hell. A single gene can produce multiple different proteins, and proteins change over time due to somatic variation. Only 1% of the genome are protein coding, called exomes. Exomes can be affected by variations to start and stop codons, non coding regions, and untranslated regions. There are entire fields dedicated to studying genome-wide, exomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, phenomics, and probably several others that I don't know about. The amount of data involved with these fields is in the tebibytes region. Have you ever seen a "small" 3GiB csv? I have. The filtered and cleaned data frames created by genetics are over 100 columns wide and have nearly 5 million entries.

There are companies creating artificial life by generating custom chromosomes. There's a whole field of computer science dedicated to biological computing, using DNA as a storage medium. There are companies dedicated to simply classifying genes.

DNA is cool as hell.

This is wild, and and important party of the plot for orphan black.

dude: I want a divorce, your honor.

judge: on what grounds?

dude: on account that my wife fucked my dead brother and had a child with him.

judge: is this true?

woman: